Tag: mainstream media

I live close to Cape Canaveral. By close, I mean that when I want to see a rocket launch, I go to my back yard. I am about a mile from the River, and maybe 3 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. So, when Hurricane Dorian started heading to Florida’s east coast, I took an interest.

Initial Reports

At first, it looked like Hurricane Dorian was going to go west over the Bahamas, then continue north-west across Florida and out into the Gulf of Mexico. This is what the news was reporting, and the question was how far north along Florida’s coast was landfall going to be?

It was during this timeframe that I was talking to a group of friends and expressing concern that it would come onshore just south of me in Vero Beach. This would put the North end (the worst end) of the storm over me. It was in this conversation that a friend of mine said “don’t worry about it, it will turn north sooner then they say and stay offshore. Florida won’t get hit that bad.” I was skeptical. Then he told me “seriously, we didn’t even take the rocket off the launch pad… it isn’t going to be bad at all”. You see, my friend works at the Space Center.

The North Turn

A few days later, the news changed their predictions and were now saying that the storm would turn north and stay offshore… just like my friend had told me. Although the news was still claiming “hurricane-force winds” and “massive storm surge”. I began to wonder about my friends prediction. It seems to me there are only 2 ways he could have been right while all the meteorologists were wrong.

The First Way

Is it possible that the government is controlling the weather? Could these hurricanes be weaponized, or at least manipulated to go where we want them to go?

The Second Way

Is the news media purposely pushing miss information to get better ratings or increase their sponsors sales by causing panic buying?

I honestly wasn’t sure what scenario was more likely.

Leaning One Way

Then I remembered something that I learned when I was a child. I am guessing that this isn’t knowledge that everyone got in elementary school, and it was specific to us because we lived so close to Cape Canaveral, but we were taught that the scientists choose to build the Kennedy Space Center where they did because the way the Gulf Stream moves by Florida in this particular spot would make it very unlikely to get a direct hit by a hurricane.

So I checked the hurricane forecasts again and they said Dorian had hurricane-force winds (over 75 mph) extending out 40 miles from the center of circulation.

Next, I checked the buoy information and found that the western wall of the Gulf Stream was 45 miles off the coast

That meant that even if Hurricane Dorian traveled along the edge of the Gulf Stream, hurricane-force winds would probably stay 8 miles to the east of me.

Meanwhile, the news was still preaching doom and gloom. They were telling us that we should expect hurricane-force winds for 24 hours straight.

What Really Happened With Hurricane Dorian

Hurricane Dorian passed by 70 miles off the coast. As radar was showing the eye due east of me, I was on my front porch. It wasn’t windy or raining. Overall we had a couple inches of rain, and wind gusts up to 25 mph. An average summer thunderstorm is worse. We never lost power, and the rain and wind wasn’t even enough to wash some fresh bird crap off my truck…

While writing this, I realized that I needed some good photographs to go with this story. So I hopped in my truck and drove around town. What I noticed was a lot of palm fronds on the ground. No flooding, no real wind damage… just palm fronds. There were a couple of sailboats that had grounded themselves, but that is to be expected. (In Florida it is easy to find a used sailboat for a few grand, and if you anchor in the river… no rent. So many of the sailboats anchored in the river are people that are 1 step away from being vagrant and therefore they are not able to do much preparation for any storm)

Overall, the town I live in actually looks better today than usual. Mostly because it seems most of the people in town have taken the time to clean debris out of their yard and trimmed their trees.

So what is the Conspiracy?

After realizing that I could predict the impact of this storm better than the news by using basic information that I learned in elementary school, I came to the conclusion that NASA was not controlling the weather, they were simply paying attention.

The news media likely also knew that this storm was no big deal for Florida. However, why pass up a good opportunity to cause panic, increase ratings, and sell a lot of their sponsors products?

The mainstream media has already shown that they can not be trusted when it comes to politics… now they have proven to me that they can not be trusted when it comes to the weather either. They are not news. They are just propaganda and marketing for the left. What good are they??

Many times I have asserted in these pages that the Mainstream Media is engaged in propaganda to sway the minds of the nation to support the causes of their business or political overlords. Many people have written that off as a “crazy conspiracy theory”. However, there is proof that the CIA has had a long running program called Operation Mockingbird, whose main purpose is to attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. They accomplish this goal by having paid CIA employees working undercover (and sometimes openly) for different news and media organizations around the world.

How The Mainstream Media Pushes Propaganda

In 1948, the CIA appointed Frank Wisner the director of the Office of Special Projects. Later renamed the Office of Policy Coordination, the group became the CIA’s covert action branch. The group concentrated on “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world”. Under the OPC, Operation Mockingbird was created to promote the CIA’s views and push propaganda. Operation Mockingbird achieved this by recruiting leading American journalists, and funding some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts. By the early 1950s, the CIA ‘owned’ respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other mainstream media outlets. Within a few years, Operation Mockingbird had major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. By the late 1950’s some reports claim that Operation Mockingbird had 3,000 salaried, and contract workers embedded in the mainstream media.

By the mid 1960’s, some independent journalists became aware of the CIA’s subversion of the freedom of the press and began publishing exposes about Operation Mockingbird. Random House published Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross in 1964. The book exposed the role of the CIA in foreign policy. Rumors are that The CIA considered buying up the entire printing of Invisible Government, but this idea was rejected when Random House responded by saying that if this happened, they would simply print a second edition. Further details of Operation Mockingbird were revealed as a result of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities in 1975 (also known as the Senator Frank Church investigations). Senator Church was able to identify over 50 mainstream media journalists who were employed directly by the CIA. Church pointed out that this was probably only the tip of the iceberg because the CIA refused to “provide the names of its media agents or the names of media organizations with which they are connected”. According to a report released by Congress in the wake of the Church investigations in 1976, “The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.” By some accounts, over a thousand books were produced, subsidized or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967.

Senator Frank Church argued that misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year.

In 1977, a Rolling Stone magazine article written by Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein Watergate fame) alleged that over 400 mainstream media journalists were in the employ of the CIA. He also claimed that one of the most important journalists contracted by Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, who wrote for over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists implicated by the Rolling Stone investigation to have been willing to promote the views of the CIA were Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (The Miami News), Herb Gold (The Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times).

In February 1976, the newly appointed Director of the CIA, George H. W. Bush, announced a new policy: “Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.” He added that the CIA would continue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.

Has Operation Mockingbird Continued to this Day?

This new policy made no statement about weather the CIA would continue to embed their agents within the entertainment industry, or push propaganda to unwitting journalists hungry for a scoop.

In 1984, famed Television producer Chuck Barris (creator of The Newlywed Game, The Dating Game and The Gong Show) released a book titled “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” (made into a movie in 2003). Chuck Barris claims in the book that while working in Hollywood, he was secretly a CIA spy. One must wonder if Barris was, in fact, an operative working under Operation Mockingbird. Most news agencies have pushed the idea that Barris’s story is an elaborate fabrication. Considering these journalists should have known about Operation Mockingbird, and Barris was at the height of his career while Operation Mockingbird was going strong, doesn’t it seem odd that they are so quick to write off his story as fabrication? It seems that these stories to discredit him may be a part of a continuing Operation Mockingbird.

In 1998, Journalist Steve Kangas alleged that Richard Mellon Scaife, the owner of Pittsburgh Tribune, and The American Spectator, was a CIA asset that ran “a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world.” In 1999 Kangas was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head in a bathroom adjacent to Scaife’s office. The death was ruled a suicide, but because of inconsistencies in the police, and coroners report, many are skeptical. In an article in Salon Magazine, (19th March, 1999) Andrew Leonard asked: “Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death?…)

While watching the news these days, it seems obvious that major stories are continuously swept under the rug in favor of celebrity gossip. Racial strife is promoted were none exists, and stories that really aren’t important to anyone dominate the headlines while world changing events are buried on the backpage.

Do you think the CIA is still in control of the Mainstream Media? Let us know in the comments below.

Additional Information:

Many of us like to think the evening news is unbiased, and honest. It smaller markets, and local channels, that is for the most part true. However, the national media channels are corporate owned, and often times do the bidding of their corporate masters. When you add that to the fact that a majority of people who enroll in journalism programs at colleges across the country are liberals, and the majority of professors teaching those courses are liberals as well, the news begins to take an opinionated twist. The big question is, who is driving the narrative, the liberal or the corporate agenda?

Several times I have seen companies vilified in the mainstream media to the point that the public opinion of those companies turns against them. Many times, a little bit of research shows that the companies in question are actually far more honorable then the people who are trying to discredit them. So why the mainstream media campaigns against them?

Case #1: Sea World

A few years ago, a documentary came out called Blackfish. This documentary lambasted SeaWorld’s treatment of Killer Whales and other animals. This documentary was full of inaccuracies, and conjecture. It misrepresented SeaWorld, and showed a vilified perception of the company. Mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon and supported the documentary with devastating effect against SeaWorld. As a result of the negative publicity in the mainstream media from this dishonest documentary, SeaWorld lost 25.4 million dollars in revenue as park attendance plummeted.

These are not isolated incidents, this is what SeaWorld does. Many people only think of the parks when they think of SeaWorld, but the truth is SeaWorld is an organization that rescues and helps sea life. The parks are there to finance their work (and to introduce the rest of us to the amazing world that lives in our oceans).

With that in mind, doesn’t it make you wonder why the mainstream media, and other groups, would claim to be trying to “save the animals” with their attacks on SeaWorld, when those attacks are damaging SeaWorld’s efforts to actually save the animals?

Case #2 Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart has always been a target of the mainstream media. I have to admit, I have never been a big fan of theirs either. My problem with Wal-Mart is simple. They tend to drive out small businesses. They do this by being able to negotiate lower rates from manufacturers because they buy in bulk for their many locations. This gives Wal-Mart lower prices, and therefore more people shop there. It seems like a good thing. I don’t like it because it takes the consumers money out of the consumers neighborhood. The owner of a Mom & Pop business usually lives rather close to their business. As a result, their profits get spent locally, and they pay taxes locally putting more of the consumers money back into their own neighborhood. But that is the only real fault I have with Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is also often accused of pushing cheap foreign made goods. However, Wal-Mart actually works hard to promote American manufacturing. According to their corporate website, “Items that are made, sourced or grown right here in America already account for about two-thirds of what we spend to buy products at Walmart U.S. But there is room to do more.

Yes, if you eat at McDonalds every day you will get fat. However, that is not McDonalds fault. If you make hamburgers and french-fries with a large soda at your house everyday, you will also get fat. McDonalds is not meant to be a daily meal. It is meant to be the place you go for a decent, cheap meal when you didn’t have time to make yourself something good.

But shouldn’t McDonalds do more to make their food healthier? They Do. McDonalds has some of the highest lean beef standards in the industry, and uses grass fed beef for their burgers. Their standards are so high, that there is not enough beef being produced in America that satisfies their standards. (most American cattle is grain fed. Grain fed cattle is not as lean as grass fed cattle) As a result, McDonalds buys some beef from Australia and New Zealand where government beef standards are even more stringent than in the U.S. As a result, U.S. Cattle farmers have said “McDonald’s leanness standards are too high, and that if McDonald’s lowered its standards to a more reasonable level, it could easily purchase all the lean beef it needs without resorting to foreign imports.”